WAIT . . . WAIT . . . WAIT . . . WAIT

I’ve never liked hospitals. I don’t even like going in them as a visitor. They’re full of sick people and I try to avoid them at all costs. Most of all I hate waiting and that’s what you do in hospitals – wait. If you go with your partner you wait around until he/she has been seen. If it’s you, then you wait around until your number is called.

You wait and wait and wait until you’re so bored you start looking at the dog-eared magazines that are always there, and have been there since the hospital opened its doors over a thousand years ago.

There’s never a Hustler or a Men Only or a Playboy in there - I mean, what would be a better way for a man to spend his time than looking at the wide open beavers in the Readers Wives section and wondering how on earth these wives got talked into degrading themselves in such a way?

The magazines you’ll find in every hospital waiting room are always the same – there’s the obligatory Reader’s Digest (every waiting room should have one), an oddly old fashioned magazine that’s only ever read by people who don’t like reading. And if you don’t like that there’s OK, Hello or Woman’s Own. If you’re not a woman there will be a selection of specialist magazines like Glue-Licker's Monthly and other equally obscure magazines that are primarily aimed at the mentally retarded who can find nothing better to fill their time than to stick things onto other things or record meaningless numbers into notebooks that will be chucked out with the rest of their rubbish when they’re dead.

Back in 1989, when I was working as the deputy editor of the Marham News, the editor told me that he had been ordered by the Station Commander to escort a group of aircraft enthusiasts (they’re like train spotters, but instead of recording meaningless train numbers in their notebooks they take down meaningless aircraft tail numbers) around the Unit. When he took them into a hangar and showed them a Tornado aircraft they were disappointed to find that it had the tail number of TA197.

“We don’t want to see this one,” the self-appointed spokesman for the group said. “We’ve already seen it. We want to see TA198.”

“Why?” asked the editor, who couldn’t for the life of him grasp why grown men would indulge themselves in such a pointless obsession.

“Because we haven’t seen that one,” came the reply.

“But it’s exactly the same as this one.”

“It’s hardly exactly the same,” snorted the self-appointed spokesman in a derisory tone, turning to his deluded disciples who were all sniggering behind their hands at the editor’s lack of understanding of the important but pointless historical research they were carrying out. “It has a different tail number.”

They were, apparently, making a list of all the different aircraft tail numbers on all the RAF Stations in the area, which would then be compiled into a book which they were planning to publish in the near future. Why anyone would want to publish such a book, let alone read it, is beyond my comprehension.

I'm digressing here, but taking a book with you into a hospital waiting room is a reasonable option to consider when combatting the boredom of being there in the first place, but that option wouldn’t even cross your mind if you were suffering from a major trauma. The last thing you would think about if you were lying in a pool of your own blood with an axe in your head is, ‘I must nip home first and select a well written book with interesting characters revolving around a fiendishly devised and totally believable plot from my extensive and comprehensive collection of Dan Brown books.’

For a start, Dan Brown is incapable of writing such a book, and secondly – you just wouldn’t.

If having to put up with the crappy magazines wasn’t enough – there’s always one kid in there who is bent on destroying the world and making everyone’s life a misery by making as much noise as possible. He shouts, he cries, he bangs things against other things while his modern parents look on because they don’t believe in disciplining him in case it affects his human rights. They don’t consider your human rights as you sit there in silent rage thinking about all the different ways you can shut their precious child up – because, not only are you suffering from an injury sustained from a night of heavy drinking, you’re also nursing the world’s worst hangover and the last thing you need, in small room bereft of any kind of intellectual stimulus, is a kid that you want to kill.

So why are we tortured like this in hospital waiting rooms? I’ll tell you why – it’s because when you finally get called in to see the doctor and he tells you that you’re dying from some unpronounceable incurable tropical disease and that you only have a month to live, the only sensation you can feel, as you take in the terrible news, is one of relief – because nothing could be worse than spending another second in that waiting room.

It’s ironic, then, that as I get older I seem to be spending more and more time in them. My knees hurt from time to time because I have a touch arthritis in them, probably due to all the road running I did when I was younger. My back and shoulders ache from sitting hunched in front of a computer all day long. My eyesight is failing because of the same. I can’t hear as well I used to and it takes me longer and longer to recover from a late night out involving alcohol. And as for dancing – well, the day after we were married my wife told me that if she had seen me dance before our wedding day she would have called the whole thing off. So, no change there then – and even though I like dancing (even if those around me don’t) my knees ache for days after the event. As an ex-punk, however, it’s disastrous – when you can no longer pogo it’s the end of life as you know it.

In short, I’m starting to fall apart.

I was in the Almana General Hospital the other day, waiting to see the excellent orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Hassan, about my knee. The acronym for Almana General Hospital is AGH, which (if you put an A before it and an exclamation mark after it) spells the death cry of a German soldier in the Commando comics of my youth – “AAGH! SIE HABEN MICH GETÖTET, SIE BRITISH SCHWEIN HUND!”

As an ex-pat I’m lucky because I have a BUPA card, which means that I get seen fairly quickly (provided I have an appointment) and if I need anything done (like a brain transplant) I’m in and out before I know it.

It’s what happens afterwards that takes time. My wife, Jackie, needed some medication after seeing the doctor at a different hospital and because they didn’t have that medication in the hospital pharmacy she was told to obtain it from the pharmacy that was outside, but still attached to the hospital.

They didn’t have any there either and so the next day I drove around every Pharmacy in Al-Khobar with the prescription and at each one I was told no, they didn’t have it. The next day I decided to try the Pharmacy outside the hospital again, just on the off-chance that the drugs may have been received.

I waited patiently in line to see the pharmacist until it was my turn. He looked at the prescription and then went into a back room. I waited and waited and waited and when he finally emerged he told me that they did have some, but I couldn’t have it because I had to get it from the Pharmacy inside the hospital. “Right,” I said, and went to the Pharmacy inside the hospital as directed and was told that they didn’t have any but the Pharmacy outside the hospital did, and that I should get it from there. I went back to the Pharmacy outside the hospital and told them that the Pharmacy inside the hospital had told me to get it from them. The Pharmacy outside the hospital said that they couldn’t give it to me because only the Pharmacy inside the hospital could give it to me.

“But the Pharmacy inside the hospital haven’t got any,” I said.

“I know.”

“So, if I go back to the Pharmacy inside the hospital they’ll tell me to come back to you because you have some.”

“Yes. We have some, but we can’t give it to you. Only the Pharmacy inside the hospital can give it to you.”

“But they don’t have any.”

“I know.”

“And you do.”

"Yes.”

“And you’re part of this hospital.”

“Yes.”

“So why can’t you give me any?”

“Only the Pharmacy inside the hospital can give it to you.”

“But they don’t have any.”

“That’s right, but we have some.”

“So, if you’re part of this hospital and the Pharmacy inside the hospital don’t have any but you do, then you should be able to give it to me.”

“No. Only the Pharmacy inside the hospital can give it to you.”

And so it went on for another thirty minutes. The only reason I gave up was because the call for Al-Fajer (evening prayer) was sounding, which meant that the inside and outside Pharmacies would be shut and I would have to wait around for forty minutes until they opened again.

I would have given up much earlier had I been younger and lacking the patience to argue whether the outside Pharmacy could give me the prescription that the inside Pharmacy didn’t have, but when you’re younger you don’t want to waste time on petty bureaucratic nonsense. As you get older it’s that sort of thing that makes time go slower, thereby giving you the impression that you are somehow extending your life.

And here I still am – older but not necessarily wiser. My joints ache a bit from time to time and I say “Neerrrhhhhh,” whenever I get up from a chair, but I have no intention of giving up and becoming an old man.

I intend to grow old disgracefully.

 When my wife was working as an Art teacher at the British International School of Al-Khobar, one of her older male colleagues stated, “I pulled an all-nighter last night.” The middle-aged teachers were impressed that such a man, coming up for retirement, could perform a feat of endurance that they could only dream about, until he qualified his statement with: “It’s the first time in ages that I didn’t have to get up halfway through the night for a piss.”

There’s a line in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart and the gorgeous Donna Reed are canoodling outside the old house that would eventually become their home. They go to kiss each other but stop and an old man sitting on his porch shouts, “Youth is wasted on the young!”

And that’s just the way I feel. I have this theory that we live our lives the wrong way round – as youngsters we have the stamina but we don’t have the knowledge or the experience and as we grow older we gain the knowledge and experience but lose the stamina.

I’ll be sixty in seven months and I can categorically tell you that I do have the knowledge and the experience and sometimes, if I wait long enough, I even have the stamina.

RECIPES FOR DISASTER

Like myself, my father-in-law is from the North of England and therefore prone to speaking his mind and he sometimes say things that others (in this politically correct world of ours) may find a little offensive but it’s really just the Northern way of ‘telling it as it is’.

During conversations, if he can’t think of anything to say he will say, “Well I.” He stretches the ‘I’ out at the end so that it sounds like “Well I-I-I-I-I-I-I,” and he is, I’m fairly sure, unaware of what he is saying. He uses it in the same way as someone who unconsciously drops ‘errrs’ and ‘umms’ and ‘okays’ in their conversations when they’re not sure what to say next.

He is also one of the most interesting, surprising and funniest men I have ever met and his best moments (that I was present at) have all been associated with food. Here are four recipes involving my father-in-law that drove my wife Jackie almost to the edge of insanity.

RECIPE 1: Gnocchi.

We were living in Winchester at the time and my father-in-law had come to stay with us for a fortnight. On the night he arrived I left him sleeping on the couch in the lounge and went into the kitchen to give Jackie a hand. We were having gnocchi that evening, which we both liked and as it was rich in carbohydrates it would be good for keeping my father-in-law’s diabetes under control.

Gnocchi is a fairly easy dish to put together once you’ve got over the scary part of actually making it yourself. To serve four people all you need is 2 potatoes, 9oz (250g) of plain flour and 1 egg. You start by boiling the peeled potatoes in a large saucepan of water until they are firm (about 15 minutes). Then you drain them, cool them and mash them. Then you mix together the mashed potatoes, flour and egg in a large bowl and knead it until it forms a ball of dough. Next you shape small portions of this dough into long snakes and then cut them into 1.5cm (½ in) pieces. Finally you bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil, drop in the gnocchi and cook them for about 3 to 5 minutes or until the gnocchi has risen to the top. Drain it and serve it with pesto, or any sauce that takes your fancy.

“Why aren’t you keeping dad company?” she asked.

“He’s asleep,” I told her.

“How long’s he been asleep?

“About half an hour.”

Jackie stopped what she was doing. “He’s not asleep – he’s slipping into a diabetic coma. You finish the gnocchi and I’ll wake him up. We need to feed him now.”

She woke her dad up while I drained the gnocchi, mixed in the pesto and piled it into a bowl. By the time I had taken it into the dining room my father-in-law was already at the table looking confused and shaken.

He looked at the bowl of food in front of him and said, “What’s this?”

“It’s good for you – just eat it,” said Jackie.

“But what is it?”

“It doesn’t matter – just eat it.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s called gnocchi, dad – so just eat it.”

“What’s gnocchi when it’s at home?”

“It’s an Italian pasta made from potatoes – just eat it.”

“A what?”

“Look, dad – we’re not trying to poison you – just eat it!”

He picked up his fork and began eating and after a few mouthfuls he began to become visibly better, but he still looked tired. He went to bed almost as soon as he’d finished his meal.

When he came downstairs the next morning he looked much better.

“Are you alright, dad?” Jackie asked him.

“Aye.”

“You sure?”

“Aye. I can’t remember much from last night.”

“That’s because you went into a diabetic coma.”

“Oh. Well I. I remember eating something.”

“Gnocchi. You had some gnocchi.”

“I don’t know what it was, but it was bloody horrible.”

Jackie has never made gnocchi since.

RECIPE 2: Watercress Soup.

A few days into my father-in-law’s stay with us Jackie decided to make watercress soup. This was our family’s favourite soup when we were living in the UK – but it did take a bit of preparation.

To make it you need 3 large bunches of watercress (about 8 oz (225g) after they’ve been destalked), 4 oz of butter, the white part of 5 leeks that have been washed and chopped, 4 medium sized potatoes that have been peeled and chopped, 3 pints of vegetable stock, 4 heaped tablespoons of crème fraîche and salt and pepper.

It was during the destalking and chopping phase that my father-in-law first entered the kitchen.

“By ‘eck,” he said to his daughter. “What are you making?”

“Watercress soup, dad.”

“Oh, well I,” he said and then wandered off to read his newspaper.

Once she’d prepared all the ingredients, Jackie melted the butter in a big, thick-based pan – then she added the leeks, potatoes and most of the watercress, stirring them around so that they were coated in the butter. After sprinkling the vegetables with salt she covered the pan with a lid and let them sweat over a gentle heat for about 20 minutes.

As she was giving the mixture a good stir halfway through this phase, my father-in-law came back into the kitchen.

“By ‘eck, that smells nice – what are you making?”

“I’m making watercress soup, dad – like I was fifteen minutes ago – remember?”

“Oh right. Well I,” he said and then wandered off to start the Daily Telegraph crossword.

After 10 minutes my wife added the stock, covered the pan and simmered it for 15 minutes. She then took the pan off the heat, cooled it a little and then began to whizz it up with an electric whizzer.

It was while she was whizzing up the soup that my father-in-law re-entered the kitchen.

"By ‘eck, that’s bloody noisy – what are you making?”

Jackie stopped the whizzer. “I’m making watercress soup, dad – watercress soup. You remember? I was making watercress soup when you came in earlier. You’ve asked me twice now what I’m making.  Its watercress soup that I’m making, dad – watercress soup. That’s what I’m making! Watercress soup!”

“Oh right. Well I,” he said and then wandered off to complete his crossword.

Jackie finished the soup off by swirling in 3 tablespoons of crème fraîche and seasoning it with salt and pepper. She reheated it gently and then served it into warmed bowls and garnished each one with some extra crème fraîche and the remaining watercress leaves. “It’s ready!” she called.

My father-in-law sat down at the table and looked down at the contents of his bowl. “By ‘eck, Jackie,” he said. “What’s this then?”

RECIPE 3: Cheese Soufflé.

Cheese Soufflé is not the easiest dish to make, but Jackie decided that it would be a nice treat for her dad in the last couple of days of his stay with us. Despite the difficulty, she was very good at making it, but getting it to rise and then not deflate as soon as it is taken out of the oven is a tricky process that often leads to failure.

Just to make it clear how complicated and difficult it is to make Cheese Soufflé here’s an “easy” recipe that’s on the BBC Good Food website:

INGREDIENTS

50g butter, plus extra for greasing

25g breadcrumbs

50g plain flour

1 tsp mustard powder

300ml milk

4 eggs

100g grated extra-strong cheddar, (blue cheese, goat's cheese and smoked cheeses also work well)

EQUIPMENT: 15cm soufflé dish, saucepan, 2 large mixing bowls, wooden spoon, spatula, baking sheet, large metal spoon, measuring jug, grater, electric whisk, cutlery knife.

Preparing the soufflé dish: Heat oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6 and place a baking sheet on the middle shelf. Butter a 15cm soufflé dish generously, then sprinkle in the breadcrumbs and rotate the dish to ensure the butter is evenly coated. Tip out any excess breadcrumbs.

Making a thick white sauce: In a pan, melt the butter over a medium heat; stir in the flour and mustard. Cook, stirring, for 1 min. Take off the heat and gradually stir in the milk, mixing it in thoroughly before adding more. Return to the heat and stir continuously until very thick (around 10 mins). Transfer to a bowl and allow to cool. Crack the eggs, placing the whites into a clean bowl and stirring the yolks into the sauce. Stir in cheddar and season well.

Adding the egg whites: Use a clean whisk to beat the egg whites until peaks form that just hold their shape (electric is best as it will make the job much quicker). Then take a metal spoon and gently stir the whipped whites into the white sauce in a figure of eight.

Top-hatting: Spoon the mixture into the dish. Run a cutlery knife around the edge to create a ‘top hat’ effect; this ensures the soufflé rises above the rim and doesn’t stick. Place on the baking sheet and bake for 25-30 mins until the top is golden and risen and has a slight wobble. Serve immediately.

As you can see, it’s not that easy.

I’d just returned home from work when she’d started making it and was, as I usually am at the end of the working day, starving.

That’s not starving as in famine beleaguered Third World African country starving – I’d never want to be that hungry. But I was a little peckish and decided to cook myself a burger to dispel the pangs of hunger that were starting to grumble in my stomach. I only had Value Burgers in the freezer and so I popped one of them under the grill and waited for the heat to reduce it to half its original size. Fortunately the top quality chefs who had created these gourmet lumps of whatever was left on the cow after all the meat had been removed had devised a secret but scientific way for the burgers to retain all their additives once all the water and fat had been deposited into bottom of the grill pan.

Value Burgers are unique in that, through this secret but scientific method, they have about as much nutritional value as a sheet of corrugated cardboard, and instead of providing the body with the necessary nutrients for it to function properly you actually end up with less nutrients in your body than before you started eating them.

But when you’re starving they do fill a hole.

RECIPE 4: Value Burger with added anger.

When I was tucking into my Value Burger my father-in-law appeared at my shoulder and asked, “Ee, can I have one of those, Steve?”

“OK,” I said. “But they’re just Value Burgers.”

“I don’t mind.”

VALUE BURGER IN A BUN

INGREDIENTS

1 Value Burger

1 Bun

Tomato Ketchup (optional)

METHOD

Remove box of Value Burgers from freezer and take out one burger. Place remaining burgers and box (if there are burgers still in box) back into the freezer and close freezer door. Remove the wax discs from either side of burger before placing under grill (this is very important if you don’t want your burger to taste of burnt paper). Turn on grill. Leave under grill until burger is approximately half its original size, turning once halfway through cooking time. Take burger off grill (remember it will be hot, so it might be useful to use a pair of tongs – a fork will do if you are poor and do not possess such luxury items as tongs). Cut bun in half with a knife (a saw will do if you do not have a knife), ensuring that you cut it horizontally and not vertically as some amateur cooks have been known to do (modern pre-cut burger buns instead of traditional ones will prevent this from happening as well as reducing the risk of amputated fingers – especially if all you have to hand is a band saw or a Stanley knife). Place burger on one half of the bun and place the other half on top of that. Ketchup can be added to give the Value Burger some flavour – ensuring, of course it is added before the other half of the bun is put in place.

I handed my father-in-law his burger and he ate it in less than a minute. About an hour later the Cheese Soufflé came out of the oven – and it was perfect. We all sat down at the table and Jackie served it up for us. It looked and smelled divine and it tasted like heaven. My father-in-law put one forkful in his mouth and said, “Mmmm.”

Now, that would have been fine had he not continued to speak, because what he said next has been a dark and depressing talking point in our house ever since. If he’d just stopped at “Mmmm,” everything would have been all right, and Jackie could have avoided spending years in counselling and lived her life secure in the knowledge that the Cheese Soufflé she had served up to us that evening was the best she had ever made.

But he didn’t.

After he had said, “Mmmm,” my father-in-law turned to me and qualified his lip-smacking expression of delight with, “by ‘eck Steve, that burger you cooked for me were gorgeous.”

I can think of only one thing that may have been more terrifying than Jackie’s reaction to what he had just said – and that would be being present when the Enola Gay delivered Little Boy to the unsuspecting civilians of Hiroshima on 6^th August 1945.

There was a brief moment of uncomfortable silence before I heard a muffled Boom, which signalled the detonation of the neutron bomb that was in Jackie’s head. “WHAAAAAAAT?!” she screamed. “THAT WAS A SHITTY, TASTELESS VALUE BURGER THAT HE COOKED FROM FROZEN IN UNDER FIVE MINUTES AND YOU THINK IT’S BETTER THAN THE CHEESE SOUFFLÉ I’VE JUST SPENT HOURS SLAVING OVER JUST TO MAKE IT PERFECT – FOR YOU!”

My father-in-law sat there with his fork in hand wondering at first what he had said that was so wrong. And then the penny dropped and a look of guilt and shame replaced the broad smile that had been there only a few seconds before. He was probably thinking that he should apologise for what he had said and maybe make amends for complimenting the wrong person for their exceptional culinary skills. But he could find no words that could ever convey how he felt at that particular moment and so, instead of expressing his regret and his overwhelming desire to beg forgiveness for his actions, he said the only thing he could think of that could possibly defuse the desperate (and potentially dangerous) situation he was in.

 

He said, “Well I-I-I-I-I-I-I.”

ANIMAL KINGDOM

A few years ago I lived in a 19^th Century cottage in a small village in Cambridgeshire with my wife, three children, three goats, six ducks, twelve chickens, a rabbit and two goldfish. We grew mint in a patch of earth under the kitchen window and strawberries in a greenhouse and there were wild blackberries growing in abundance at the bottom of the garden.

Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? A bit like the TV series The Good Life.

But fiction and fact are rarely the same. The goats were a pain in the arse – they ate all the mint and munched their way through the blackberries and also the bushes they grew on, they smashed their way into the greenhouse and polished off most of the strawberries and they systematically destroyed the goat-house we had built for them before them one of them died in mysterious circumstances in the night. The ducks shat everywhere and the males shagged the females repeatedly until they couldn’t take any more, at which point the males changed tactics (and species) and started on the hens until we were forced to get a rooster to separate them. The rooster crowed from dawn ‘til dusk and the hens finished the rest of the strawberries as well as eating all the grass, before three of them drowned in the duck pond we’d just installed. The rabbit hated me and attacked me whenever I went near it and then died and I accidentally killed the goldfish with some embalming fluid.

There will always be problems associated with keeping that many animals – the daily grind of cleaning them out and the cost of feeding them and checking them out to see if they’re still healthy and the vet bills when they’re not. There was no chance for the family to go away together because no-one with any sense would take on the responsibility of looking after such a large menagerie of beasts and birds. 

On the bright side, we took comfort in the fact that our children were growing up in an environment which would teach them to treat animals with respect – once, that is, we had explained to our two boys that chasing the goats around the garden with sticks was a bad thing. So, although it wasn’t The Good Life, it wasn’t exactly a bad life within the boundaries of our property. The bad life, it turned out, was when we had to leave the safe confines of our animal kingdom and try to mix in with the locals.

Anyone moving from a city into the country will find that things are vastly different. People are not as friendly or as forthcoming in a village as they are in an urban sprawl. In some parts of Lincolnshire you have to have lived there for more than thirty years before anyone will accept you as a member of the community. You can help the church, donate to local charities, go regularly to the local pub but all that counts for nothing because the locals will still think of you as an outsider and regard you with suspicion and mistrust. A friend of mine once told me that after his mother had died he and his father had moved from London into a village in Norfolk in the late fifties, but it wasn’t until his father died over thirty years later that he was accepted by the locals. “Death,” he said sadly, “seemed to be the only way in for outsiders.”

It wasn’t nearly as bad as that where we lived, but moving into a small village is sometimes like turning the clock back fifty or sixty years. Attitudes are different. Men go down the pub while the women stay at home – even if they have no children.

One of the women my wife knew inherited some money after a relative died, which her husband promptly used to buy himself a brand new motorbike, but when his wife came home a week later with a paddling pool for the kids that had cost her the princely sum of £3.99 in Wilkinson, her husband called her a whore and made her take it back.

This same man also complained to his wife that she wasn’t giving him enough sex. Any normal woman would have ignored him and carried on as usual, but his wife insisted that she was providing him with the correct amount – and to prove it she would mark each day she had fulfilled his carnal desires with a tick on the calendar that was hanging in the kitchen.

When my wife and two of her friends went to see her one day they asked her what all the ticks on the calendar meant and the woman stupidly told them. She even elaborated by telling them that her husband had insisted that only full sex counted and that if she treated him to oral sex then it had to be immediately followed by full sex – presumably giving him a few minutes to recover before the second act. The story, as you may imagine, spread around the village like wildfire and whenever this couple came round to see us we always made sure that there were more ticks marked on our calendar than theirs.

By far the worst thing about the village was waiting for the morning bus to pick the kids up and take them to school. When my wife was working as an Art Tutor for the Cambridgeshire County Council she used to wait with the other mothers for the bus to arrive before she went to work. Every night when I got home she used to moan and complain about the women at the bus stop and I used to listen to her and try to calm her down by telling her to just forget about it.

“I can’t forget about it,” she said. “They’re all bitches who talk all the time and say nothing. And that’s when they’re not totally ignoring me because I have a job and they don’t!”

“Come on,” I said. “It can’t be that bad.”

Six months later my wife changed jobs and started working for an accountancy firm in Huntingdon, which meant leaving the house early.

Which meant I had to put the kids on the bus before I left for work.

Now, I’m not saying that my wife and I are the cleverest people in the world, but standing next to these women every morning made me think I was. The boundaries of their conversations with each other never went beyond babies, cleaning and household products. They knew no life at all outside child care, housework and TV soap operas. Two or three of them actually considered it a badge of honour for never having read a book in their entire lives. Ever.

What is strange is that before they were married and had kids they must have been able to hold intelligent conversations with their peers before they all turned into the Stepford Wives. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they were always like that. Maybe it’s what attracted their husbands to them in the first place.

 "I went to see the new James Bond film last night,” I said to one of them.

“Oh,” she replied vacantly. “Which one?”

“Casino Royale,” I told her.

She thought about this with her mouth open for a few moments before saying, “I don’t like James Bond Films.”

“Really? I love them. I always have.”

“Oh no,” she said finally. “He makes too much mess, I just want to clean up after him.”

“Get a fucking life,” I said, “you moronic, empty headed thicko!”

I didn’t really say that – I just thought it because she had already turned her back on me to talk to someone about how the Tesco own brand kitchen cleaner is just as good as Flash, but cheaper.

No wonder my wife used to leave that bus stop angry and upset. Within two weeks of standing at that there I wanted to machine-gun the lot of them.

We had moved to that small village in Cambridgeshire from another small village in Buckinghamshire, and we had moved there from the city of Winchester.

Winchester was a wonderful place to live. We were housesitting for some friends of ours who had moved to Seattle in the United States. The house was a large three storey Edwardian building that was a two minute walk from the centre of town and so we were almost in its cultural heart – the beautiful Cathedral was nearby, there was a cinema just around the corner and a theatre a short stroll from there. There were pubs, wine bars, book shops and galleries all within walking distance. The schools were excellent and the people were open, warm and friendly.

All good things, as they say, must come to end and when I accepted a teaching job at Halton in Buckinghamshire, I found that the ninety-minute drive to and from work every day was killing me and so we reluctantly decided to move closer to where I worked.

We moved into a small village in the Claydons, about twenty miles from Halton because it was all we could afford. To say that it was a culture shock would be putting it mildly. It was like moving from Shang-ri-la to Royston Vasey. It was a cultural vacuum.

The house was situated in a small cul-de-sac and the neighbours seemed friendly at first, but it wasn’t long before we discovered that there was a seething resentment towards us because ours was the only property in that dead end street that was privately owned. All the other properties that surrounded us were owned by the Housing Association.

Now, I’m not having a go at tenants of Housing Association properties because my wife and I had once lived in one ourselves and, in amongst the relatively few junkies, pissheads and serial killers, there were some genuinely nice, friendly people.

I was on leave for the first month after we had moved into the house in the Claydons and so I spent that entire time dressed exclusively in jeans and T-shirts. One set of neighbours befriended us and they couldn’t have been more helpful. They invited us over to their house for pancakes and even lent us a chair because we were a family of five and only had four dining chairs.

Life seemed good, but all that stopped on my first day of work. Living in our own house was bad enough, but seeing me leaving the house in a suit to go to a real job was beyond the pale.

The neighbours who had befriended us stopped talking to us almost immediately. They refused to give back things that we had lent them and so we held onto their chair out of spite. The husband was a gardener of no fixed ability whose own garden looked like the Somme – after the battle. His wife had a pinched face who looked like she was permanently angry about something, and in a cage in the alleyway next to their house they had a dog that barked day and night and was never, as far as I observed, taken for walks.

They turned overnight into the most spiteful, evil people we had ever had the misfortune of knowing. They tampered with my car and poured weed killer on our front lawn when we went away. They told the other neighbours unfounded stories about us, which backfired on them after my wife had the brilliant idea of never talking about them in the company of others, no matter how bad we felt. This had the desired effect of the neighbours not actually believing anything they said about us.

We lasted eighteen months there before we moved to the village in Cambridgeshire after I secured another teaching job at Wyton. The day we moved was a joyous occasion, and not just because we were moving away.

Three days before we moved I overheard the gardener talking to his friend about how he hadn’t taxed his three cars for over two years and that he had placed forged or photocopied tax discs in his windshield and had never been stopped by the police. As a result of the anonymous call I made to the Buckinghamshire constabulary he was paid a visit by some nice uniformed gentlemen and made to tax all his cars within twenty-four hours and pay a fine or go to prison.

We still had the chair they had lent us eighteen months earlier and I took great delight in chopping it into little pieces and taking all but one leg of it down to the tip, which I placed on their path just before we drove away forever.

And just to put the icing on the cake, the day before we left I made a note of all the telephone numbers of the Chinese and Indian takeaways in the local area (of which there were many). Once we were safely in our new home I called each and every one of them and got them to deliver delicious oriental and sub-continental meals to his house at fifteen minute intervals throughout the night.

That one still makes me smile.

Our new immediate neighbours were - if a little mad - at least friendly enough.

But even so, after two years of living there, it suddenly struck me - as I was waiting at the bus stop, listening to the mums talking about cleaning materials and whatever brainless programmes they'd watched on TV the night before - that I much preferred the company of my family and our collection of beasts and birds than the animal kingdom that lay beyond the boundaries of our property.

AND THE WINNER IS THE ONE THAT SHOULDN'T HAVE WON

It’s almost that time again. Yes, Hollywood will soon begin to overindulge itself in a frenzy of backslapping, tearful acceptance speeches and (for the most part at least) wrong choices. Yes – the 86^th Academy Award ceremony is just around the corner. Nine films have been nominated for best picture and it seems that American Hustle appears to be the front runner.

While I’ll admit that the performances are excellent (particularly the one by Christian Bale’s toupee) can anyone tell me why this boring, overlong, pointless and distinctly underwhelming film has received all the plaudits?

Because I’m baffled.

I haven’t seen Her, Nebraska or Philomena yet, but 12 Years A Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, Captain Phillips and Gravity are all vastly superior to American Hustle.

But then the panel of voters selected for the Academy Awards have often made strange and dubious choices for the film that they consider to be the best of the year.

Yes, I admit that throughout the years of the Academy’s existence the best film has been selected – Casablanca in 1942, Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, The Godfather and The Godfather Part 2 in 1972 and 1974, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, Unforgiven in 1992 and No Country For Old Men in 2007 – but in many cases the film that should have won (whether  it's because of the political climate in the US or the stupidity of the voting panel) has often been overlooked.

The first really famous film to fall foul of this was Orson Welles’ ground breaking and notorious Citizen Kane, which tells the story of Charles Foster Kane, who rose from humble beginnings to become a wealthy, greedy and ultimately isolated and reviled human being. The film starts with a group of reporters trying to understand why Kane’s last word was “Rosebud” and from then on it’s constructed like a jigsaw puzzle, told through multiple viewpoints (many of which conflict with each other).

Its notoriety sprang from the fact that it was a thinly veiled account of the life of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who attempted (unsuccessfully) to have every print of the film burned. It was also rumoured that the film’s motif Rosebud was Hearst’s pet name for his wife’s clitoris.

Welles, who had never directed a film before, claimed that he watched John Ford’s film Stagecoach thirty-seven times to prepare himself for the task ahead. Whether it was because Welles was a first time director and saw film as having no boundaries or because he approached the project with the same verve and ambition that he utilised in his stage and radio productions (most notably in his adaptation of War of the Worlds), Citizen Kane has more than earned its reputation as a masterpiece – it’s a brilliant firework display of a movie with Greg Tolland’s masterful use of deep focus photography and imaginative camera angles, a startling use of expressionist lighting, a literate and intelligent screenplay by Welles and Herman J Mankiewicz that used (for the first time) overlapping dialogue, and outstanding, natural performances (especially those from Joseph Cotton and Welles himself as Kane).

Welles had reportedly coaxed his cinematographer, Greg Tolland, away from John Ford after he had seen The Grapes of Wrath and so it was ironic then that he lost out to Ford’s vastly inferior How Green Is My Valley, filmed in Technicolor with everyone concerned doing terrible Welsh accents that occasionally sounded Irish (and sometimes Scottish) and with Hollywood star Walter Pidgeon, who appeared to give up on his attempted Welsh accent fifteen minutes in and revert to own American twang for the remaining hour and forty-five minutes of the film.

How Green Is My Valley is a dated, unimaginative, turgid melodrama, and was (wrongly) voted the best picture of 1941. It is now largely forgotten and shown only as a filler on daytime television schedules, but Welles’ pyrotechnical masterwork has topped Sight and Sounds poll of the best film of all time more than any other in the magazine’s history and that’s because modern cinema began with Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane was just the first of many. Down through the years of the Academy’s history mediocrity has triumphed over intelligence and originality. In 1977, Sylvester Stallone’s formulaic and predictable boxing film Rocky was up against Alan J Pakula’s All The President’s Men, a brilliant political thriller about Watergate, Sidney Lumet’s Network, a scathingly satirical attack on television exploitation and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a disturbing view of an ordinary man’s descent into madness and murder. Guess which film won? I’ll give you a clue – it’s none of the last three I just mentioned.

And don’t get me started on Martin Scorsese, who (despite being one of the most innovative and brilliant directors America has ever produced) is one of the most shamelessly overlooked directors in the history of the Academy’s existence. He has directed a feast of dynamic and original classics – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The King of Comedy, Casino, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Hugo and most recently The Wolf of Wall Street (which I think is his best film to date - with an electrifying performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, proving yet again that he is the most talented and versatile actor of his generation) – but he won his only best director Oscar for The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs. It’s a great film but he should have won an Oscar for any (if not all) the films I mentioned previously. Giving him the Oscar for The Departed was a bit like giving John Wayne his best actor Oscar for his portrayal of John Wayne with a patch over his eye in True Grit when he really should have won it for his powerful and penetrating role as the revenge driven, racist Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

And I don’t care what anyone says – the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit was much better than Henry Hathaway’s original.

Martin Scorsese wasn't the first director to be ignored by the Academy. The great Alfred Hitchcock was also given the cold shoulder come Oscar time. Throughout his long and distinguished career he never once won an Oscar for best director, even though he was responsible for introducing many of the cinematic techniques we take for granted today. Remember the scene in Jaws when the boy is attacked by the shark and the camera zooms into Chief Brody's face while the background rushes away - this is now known in the film industry as the Vertigo Zoom because it was first used in Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo in order to give the audience a sense of disorientation. In Psycho he became the first director to kill off the film's major star, Debbie Reynolds, within the first thirty minutes. Psycho - for better or worse - also ushered in the genre now known as the slasher movie. He was the first to shoot a film in one take (Rope), the first to set a thriller entirely in one room (Rear Window), the first to show children being killed in a bomb blast (Sabotage), the first to have a charming psychopath as a central character (Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on Train). The magazine MovieMaker described him (quite rightly) as the most influential filmmaker of all time, but the Academy couldn't see that. Why? Because they were idiots who regarded Hitchcock's films (as they did with Steven Spielberg's until he made Schindler's List) as being too commercial to be of any worth.

But the same old story has repeated itself over and over again throughout the last thirty years or so. Apocalypse Now, possibly the greatest war film ever made, lost out in 1979 to the dire and manipulative tear-jerker Kramer vs Kramer. In 1983 the dreadful Terms of Endearment won the award instead of The Right Stuff, Phillip Kaufman’s brilliantly told story about NASAs Apollo Project. Twee, boring, politically correct Driving Miss Daisy was apparently a better film in 1989 than the superb My Left Foot. And then there was Titanic in 1997, picking up as many awards as Ben Hur, probably because it was just as boring, overlong and shit. Finally on my hit list of Oscar winners is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, A Beautiful Mind (from the usually reliable Ron Howard). It’s a vapid, empty, pointless film that tells you absolutely nothing about the person it’s about.

Ron Howard has not made many bad films, but when he does make one it's not just bad - it's mind-bogglingly terrible. Anyone who has followed this blog will know that my least favourite film of all time  is Top Gun - but thinking about it, there are two films that are worse than that steaming pile of horse manure - and they are both directed by Ron Howard. As bad as Top Gun is, it is still watchable if only for the flying sequences and if you're so drunk you can't hear any of the predictable dialogue. The two films directed by Ron Howard that I'm talking about here have got nothing going for them at all because, right from the start they were hamstrung by the very worst source material that has ever existed.

That's right, you guessed it - they are both based on books by the world's worst writer, Dan Brown, whose central character, Robert Langdon, is the most boring creation in recent fiction. I have every confidence that my wife could knit a more interesting character than Robert Langdon.

I thought the books were bad enough but the films surpassed even their level of total, mind-numbing stupidity, and I was amazed to find that the wafer-thin, zero-dimensional characters of the books were transferred to the screen with even less charisma than they had on the page.

Watching Tom Hanks as the internationally renowned (and dumbest) symbologist (a made-up profession if ever I heard one) in the world, racing around with a ridiculous haircut struggling to solve puzzles that a five year-old could have worked out before him was worse than having to stand on my head for two hours in a bucket full of shit. When I went to see the film I had this vague notion that Ron Howard would somehow improve the book, using his directorial skills to transform it into something that was, at the very least, exciting – but I was wrong, and I quickly came to the conclusion that the only way you could ever improve a Dan Brown book is by burning it.

Apparently Ron Howard is turning the latest travesty by Dan Brown, Inferno, into a movie, which is a shame as his latest release, Rush, is a truly thrilling film about the rivalry between the racing drivers James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. Inferno, on the other hand, is anything but thrilling - it's dull, unbelievable, stupid and worthless. With not even enough plot to fill a short story, the book spends most of it great length acting as a travelogue of Venice and other Italian cities. If I wanted to read a travelogue about an Italian city I would have bought a Lonely Planet travel guide because (a) it would have been better written than Dan Brown's effort, and (b) no, that's it - there is no (b).

So, I don’t like Dan Brown’s books or films made from them. I don’t like Titanic, A Beautiful Mind, Kramer vs Kramer, Terms of Endearment, Driving Miss Daisy or any of the commercially driven effluence that is squeezed out of the arse of Hollywood. And I didn’t like American Hustle.

In that case, what films (in my humble opinion) should have been nominated instead of American Hustle? Well, there’s Saving Mr Banks, a beautifully told film with great performances from Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks and Colin Farrell about the problems Walt Disney had when attempting to secure the rights of Mary Poppins from Mrs PL Travers. There’s also Ron Howard's Rush, which I just mentioned. The Coen Brothers should be there with Inside Llewyn Davis, a film about a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village in the early sixties with an ending that makes you rethink everything you’ve just watched. The Frozen Ground is a true story featuring standout performances from John Cusack as a serial killer and Vanessa Hudgens (yes – her from High School Musical) as the victim that got away. Richard Curtis’ quirky time travel film About Time should have been considered. And finally there’s Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, a film that I suspected would be a cheesy, gung-ho American war film that turned out to be nothing of the sort. It’s a brutally honest and moving depiction of brotherhood and heroism in the face of overwhelming odds that tells the true story of a team of four US Navy SEALs who make the correct moral choice after a mission goes wrong in Afghanistan and end up paying for it with their lives.  

But let’s forget the Oscars now and concentrate on a film that didn’t have a hope in hell of winning any award anywhere, but what I nevertheless thought was the most entertaining and enjoyable film I had the pleasure of seeing all last year.

It’s directed by Anthony C Ferrante and features a cast of characters that are paper-thin composites of characters that have drifted in from other films.  There's little or no plot. Logic has been replaced by a lack of continuity and a total disregard for anything remotely scientific. The actors range from being mediocre to bad to terrible and the special effects are often hilariously ineffective. It starts with a pointless prologue involving a small fishing boat, a  captain wearing a silly hat and speaking in a strange accent, a dodgy Japanese businessman, a suitcase full of money, a bowl of shark-fin soup and a chase around the deck of the aforementioned small fishing boat. After the title sequence none of these things are mentioned again in the film – ever.

It's a terrible film – but, you know what – it's also brilliant because it was never meant to be taken seriously. Here's a young director working within a tight budget (and producing a film that actually does what it set out to do) with money that he'd probably borrowed from his Auntie. Sam Raimee did much the same with The Evil Dead and he went on to direct the blockbuster Spider-man. Even well-established directors with budgets running into millions can't achieve that - anyone remember the disaster that was Cleopatra?

Watching Anthony C Ferrante's film slightly pissed with a bunch of mates made it probably the funniest film experience I’ve encountered in recent years. For those of you who haven’t worked it out yet – it’s called Sharknado and it’s about some tornados coming in from the sea with – wait for it – sharks in them.

By coming up with the idea of doing a mash-up of the films Twister, Jaws and Deep Blue Sea, Anthony C Ferrante (for me at least) has proved that he is an absolute genius.

Enough said!

To all the readers of this blog - I now have my own website at www.stephen-mitchell.co.uk. Have a look if you want. The more hits I get the better.

Thanks for all your support.